Parenthetical Womanhood - Three Poems by Sakshi Nain Bishnoi

Imaginary Cemeteries

I was in the waiting room

my legs were almost straight.

Criminal Hopes

A vaguely repulsive mystery

A decisive site of history

The eel of my consciousness slipped.

Let's try not to faint or vomit.

"Which body would you like?"

"Do you like these feet?"

I liked them on my mother’s.

This was a battle lost in advance.

It is going. I am not.

Perhaps this is why she goes mad.

Feminine Meetings

Unity of two distant orbits

For me.

But also for her.

Turbulence of the I

moulded into a testimony of

collective loss.

Without the light giving any sign

of the passing of time.

They simply wait.

Not a sign of love, but of selection.

Beyond servitude of the imaginary.

A mirror accompanies us.

Parenthetical Womanhood

Leapt up

Into the arms

Of the disquiet

A comfortable pleasure.

Beyond maternity, Potential destiny

The unending brilliant youth

Beyond the skin, the womb.

A violent refusal

Beyond the legendary relics

The running self

With its related sufferings

Is a disciple of inhumanity.

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About the Poet:

Sakshi Nain Bishnoi (she/they) is a researcher, writer, and activist based in Delhi. Their interdisciplinary practice engages with the intersections of gender, migration, literature, and rural sociology. Grounded in embodied experience, Sakshi’s work explores the liminal interstices of selfhood, queerness, and rurality- foregrounding the body as both subject and method. They are committed to reimagining narratives from the margins, particularly those emerging from rural North India, through a feminist and materialist lens.